Percy Bysshe Shelley

I was no longer the votary of Romance; till then I had
existed in an ideal world; now I found that in this universe of
ours was enough to excite the interest of the heart, enough
to employ the discussions of Reason. I beheld in short that I had
duties to perform. -- Percy Bysshe Shelley, letter to William Godwin, 1812

I am formed, - if for anything not in common with the herd of
mankind - to apprehend minute & remote distinctions of feeling
whether relative to external nature, or the living beings which
surround us, & to communicate the conceptions which result
from considering either the moral or material universe as a whole. --
Percy Bysshe Shelley, letter to William Godwin, 1817

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), radical poet, spent most of his
short, tragic life in semi-obscurity in exile. Following his
tragic death, and the promotion of his work by his wife
Mary Shelley, his work enjoyed a brief
Renaissance and enjoyed the recognition it deserved, he then once
again sank into obscurity, eclipsed by his wife's authorship of
Frankenstein.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was educated at Eton, then Oxford. At
Oxford he read the radical authors Thomas Paine and William
Godwin. He acquired a reputation at Oxford for being something
of an eccentric, and was eventually sent down for circulating a
pamphlet he had co-authored with his friend T J Hogg (later to be
Shelley's biographer) in favour of atheism, 'The Necessity of Atheism'.

In the same year he was sent down from Oxford (1811), Shelley
married the sixteen year old Harriet Westbrook. It wasn't a
happy marriage, they separated three years later, and in 1816 she
committed suicide by drowning in the Serpentine.

Shelley eloped with sixteen year old Mary Goodwin, and they later
became exiled in Italy. Shelley befriended Lord Byron and they
became close friends.

It was whilst the Shelley's were cooped up with Lord Byron and
friends in a cottage on the shores of Lake Geneva with a storm
raging all around that Frankenstein was created. They challenged
each other to write a ghost story. The party was so impressed by
Mary Shelley's story that she was persuaded to turn it into a
full length novel and publish.

Shelley died in a tragic boating accident off the coast of Italy
(18 July 1822). Of the Shelley's four children, only one
survived.

Shelley was a revolutionary and radical, ahead of his time. He
was also a strong advocate of women's rights, having been
influenced by Mary's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797). He
was anti the current establishment and privilege, church and
state. His strongly held views and beliefs, together with the
need to escape from the clutches of money lenders, drove him into
exile.

Although an atheist, Shelley had a profound respect for Christ,
who he saw as a fellow revolutionary.

Shelley's exile was a time of great upheaval and growing
inequality in England, such equality has only been seen in modern
times in Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair's Britain. The
Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815, although Britain was the victor it
left a huge war debt and, as in the aftermath of the First World
War, it was the poor who were forced to pay the price. In the
Peterloo Massacre, troops cut down and killed protesting workers
(1819). This was to influence Shelley to write The Mask of
Anarchy and 'Ode to the West Wind'.

'Ode to the West Wind' was written when Shelley witnessed a
violent storm whilst out walking in Florence. He was still
seething with anger over the Peterloo Massacre, added to which
were unfavourable reviews of his work in England, and his
relationship with Mary was cooling rapidly. Whilst on the
surface the Ode contains a brilliant description of the storm,
there is a subtext calling to revolution. A subtext that has
inspired the Literati Left ever since.

The Mask of Anarchy was not published until after
Shelley's death as the publisher feared prosecution.

In the same year as the Peterloo Massacre Shelley wrote
Peter Bell the Third, a satire on the mediocre poet
William Wordsworth, published posthumously 20 years later in
1839. Shelley particularly detested Wordsworth as he had turned his
back on reform.

Shelley was able to adapt his style to the subject matter,
satire, lyrical, formal ode. The Mask of Anarchy
has Gothic horror running through it, and some of the blackness
of the poetry and tales of Edgar Allan Poe.
As does Prometheus Unbound as we can see from the
following fragment (II iv 19-23):

... terror, madness, crime, remorse,
Which from the links of the great chain of things
To every thought within the mind of man
Sway and drag heavily, and each one reels
Under the load towards the pit of death ...

Whilst still at Oxford, Shelley wrote and published two Gothic
novels, Zastrozzi (1810) and St Irvyne
(1810). Major works include Queen Mab (1813, pirate
copies published 1821), The Revolt of Islam (1818),
originally published the year before as Laon and Cythna,
then hastily withdrawn, to be republished in a toned down version
with a new title, The Cenci (1819),
Prometheus Unbound (1820), Swellfoot the
Tyrant (1820), also known as Oedipus Tyrannus,
a satire on George IV and the Caroline Affair,
immediately withdrawn following publication, Adonais (1821),
Hellas (1822), Posthumous Poems
{edited by Mary Shelley} (1824). Other works included numerous
translations and two important essays 'A Philosophical View of Reform'
(written 1819, first published 1920) and 'A Defence of Poetry'
(written 1821, published 1840).

Controversial in life, so in death. Following his death, the
body of Shelley was cremated on a funeral pyre on the beach not
far from where he drowned. A funeral befitting a Greek tragic
hero. His heart was not consumed by the flames and was rescued by
Edward Trelawny. There than followed an unseemly tussle between
Mary Shelley and Leigh Hunt, who had acquired the heart. Mary
finally obtained custody. She secreted the heart in a copy of
Adonais, which she kept under her pillow.

Early Gothic influences on Shelley were Monk Lewis and
Ann Radcliffe.

Monk Lewis (1775-1818), educated at
Westminster and Christ College, Oxford, was author of
The Monk (1796). In the first half of the 20th century
The Oxford Companion to English Literature described
The Monk as unreadable due to its mix of the indecent
and supernatural 'The mixture of the supernatural, the horrible,
and the indecent makes the book unreadable to-day'.

Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823) wrote several Gothic novels, the best
known being The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and
The Italian (1797).